So would it be best if you had a situation like steppe?
Sideloading a very big image book?

If it's for you own use, by all means strip the source. Steppe was uploading a very large book to Amazon's KDP service, it was above their maximum allowed upload file size before having the source stripped.

I made a few modifications to get it to work with Python 3 - it still works in Python 2.7 (and likely 2.6 as well, but I haven't tested that).

Ran it through 2to3, which switched the print statements to a function by adding parentheses, and switched xrange to range. Then marked five strings ('NONE', 'EXTH', 'BOOKMOBI', 'SRCS', and '\0') with a "b" to mark them as byte strings rather than Unicode.

As pdurrent points out in the post above yours, KindleStrip uses Python 2.x still, so you will have to install an older version of ActivePython. You should be able to have both installed in separate directories. Python 3 is the way of the future, but it is significantly different from, and incompatible with, Python 2.x.

AN UPDATE: The output file of KindleStrip 1.35 works OK in the new version of Kindle Previewer: v2.8. This is true of .mobi files generated by KindleGen 1.2 and 2.8. Thank you, PDurrant and KevinH, for creating and maintaining this software.

This will be especially useful now that the Personal Documents service preserves kf8 formatting. AFAICT, it does not strip the source before storing (file size is only modestly reduced), and there is a 50MB maximum file size enforced by Send to Kindle (and that limit is higher than can generally be sent as an email attachment). In some cases, it might be helpful to upload separate kf8 and mobi files to get under this minimum (mobi still required for iOS). Is there a way to do this?